Bad Power Day

Starting from about 4:00 this afternoon, our office at Alexandria is having bad power problem. The power got cut off randomly every few minutes, but everytime it will just be a split second. Sometimes our machines survived, but many time those boxes did not. Because I am working on a notebook with battery plugged in, I did not really loose my work. Two of our main file servers and our firewall box are also on UPS, so there was not much down time for me anyway. However, it is just so trouble some trying to reset dead boxes and cheap switches around the office every few minutes. Originally I thought it was just our building, and some nasty appliances are chewing up all the power. However, we heard on the radio that apparently the whole Sydney is having this problem - some major construction seems to be happening. That sounds like a Bad Power Day to me.

Oops. The power went off for another 3 seconds, and my colleagues are starting to give up and go home.

My home server that serves my blog site keeps on dying as well today because of the power problem. It has already rebooted a couple times in the afternoon, and I am not sure how many more reboot can it take. In fact, I think it is down at the moment and I am just blogging along waiting for it to fsck 3 IDE hard disk and come back to life so I can post and publish this.

Waiting... Waiting...

Meanwhile, West Sydney is having bad bush fire at the moment, and quite a few people have lost their home. The traffic is bad and congested as people are rushing, but because of the Sydney-wide power outage, some traffic lights in the city CBD are not working. chaotic...

Okay. I am actually back home now because the old dual celeron box refuse to boot, and I have to manually press the power button to get it started.
Update: According to an ABC interview at 16:40, an Energy Australia guy said that " Bush fires are affecting the transgrid system statewide. 2 high power transmission lines are down. Substation for State Rail Authority in Clyde had exploded. Safety systems are kicking in, causing instability in Drummoyne." Sounds pretty bad to me. Moreover, there was going to be a solar eclipse today where Sydney can see 48% of sun covered by the shadow the moon at around 7:54pm today. That surely will bring in more chaos as people are coming out to see the sun.